“There’s no station over Chrysanthemum?” David asked.
“Yes there is,” Niska told them. The Augment had arrived on the bridge shortly before their arrival in-system. “May I?” he asked, stepping up to an empty console. David gestured for him to go ahead, and he manipulated the controls, zooming in on the habitable world.
“They pulled an asteroid into orbit when they colonized the planet,” he explained, highlighting the captured rock. “The plan was to eventually use it as a counterweight for an orbital elevator, but right now they’ve set up some fuelling infrastructure and a few micro-gee factories on the Rock.”
“Send a note to the planet,” David instructed Jenna. “And then set our course for the Rock.” He turned to Niska. “I suggest you and Mons’ people start going over the ships,” he continued. “I don’t really plan on staying here for long. When do I get paid?”
“Once the ships have been delivered and we’ve had a chance to inspect them,” Niska told him. “Give me a day or two once we’re in place – should let you find some kind of cargo on Chrysanthemum.”
“And just what does this place export?” David asked, eyeing the planet on the screen.
“Paranoia. Surveillance satellites. Tanks. Some really good fish.”
#
An hour passed in quiet. Niska eventually left the bridge as the Blue Jay slowly made its way towards Chrysanthemum. David sent Jenna to get some rest, as they were easily thirty six hours from the planet still. He was alone on the bridge when the transmission from the planet finally arrived.
“Chrysanthemum System Control to freighter Blue Jay. We have received your identifiers and cargo description. Please confirm that you can establish an encrypted link with the Group Commander of the LSDF contingent and stand by.”
David flipped open an intercom channel to Group Commander Mons quarters.
“Commander Mons, I have a request for an encrypted channel for you from the surface,” he informed her. With a four and a half minute delay on all communications, he had the time to check with her before replying.
“Thank you Captain,” she replied, sounding brightly awake. “I’ll link in and provide you with a code set to use to link them directly to me.”
A few keystrokes later, David had set up a connecting channel for Mons that even he couldn’t eavesdrop on, and then recorded his response to CSC.
“System Control, this is Captain Rice aboard the Blue Jay,” he introduced himself. “Channel 77-15-AC has been set up for an encrypted channel. Group Commanders Mons advises you to use encryption group Gamma-Five.”
He sent the message, and settled back into watching the ships move around the system. Five minutes for each transmission to travel one way made for long conversations.
Ten minutes later, his console advised him that an encrypted recording had come in on the channel he’d provided. A few minutes later, Mons used the Jay’s transmitter to send a response.
By the time several exchanges had passed along the encrypted channel, an hour had passed, and then he finally received a transmission directed at him.
“Captain Rice, welcome to the Chrysanthemum system,” the uniformed traffic controller told him. “Unfortunately, we have no ability to provide docking for a vessel of your size – any attempt to land a vessel of your size on the Rock would likely cause structural damage. I am transmitting an orbit that will allow Commander Mons’s teams to land the gunships without issue. Once that is complete, we will be able to send a tanker out to fuel your ship up – consider it our part of your fee.”
The man glanced over to one side, reading a message that must have come up on a screen that was off-camera, and then glanced back to David with a surprised look on his face.
“The President has also personally asked me to invite you and your senior officers to join us for the celebration of the Midsummer Festival,” he continued, slowly. “Your arrival is timely – the summer solstice for our northern hemisphere falls tomorrow night, so you should be able to enter orbit, offload the gunships, and make it down with time to spare. We should be able to get your ship fuelled while you’re on the surface.”
David waited for a long moment, trying to make sense of the man’s reaction. He wasn’t sure how comfortable he was with the tanker docking with the Jay while he was on the surface, but it would allow them to head out quickly if he found – or clearly wouldn’t find – a cargo. With a shrug, he switched the recorder on and smiled at the traffic controller.
“Thank you for the welcome,” he began. “Inform your President that my officers and I will be glad to attend.”
The best way to avoid a trap, in his experience, was to walk into it with your eyes wide open.
#
Damien had spent almost the entire trip either in his lab, the simulacrum chamber, or hiding in Rib A with Kelly, where none of the passengers had quarters. After his one meal with Niska, the only members of their Legatan passengers he’d seen had been the four Augments assigned to guarding the simulacrum. Those four young men had been unfailingly polite, if skittish around the Mage.
He was in his lab, ignoring the guards outside and looking forward to a planned dinner with LaMonte, when the Captain buzzed him.
“Captain,” he answered the intercom, flipping the feed from the bridge up onto his work-screen.
“Damien, how is everything looking on your end?” Rice asked, his eyes focused on his own screens, away from the camera.
“We’ve no issues,” Damien answered, somewhat confused. “All of the runes are clean, the amplifier is fully functional.”
“The locals have invited the ship’s senior officers to the surface to join them in a local festival,” David told him.
“You need me to mind the ship while you’re gone?” Damien asked. If the remainder of the ship’s senior officers were ground-side, he would technically be in charge. He wouldn’t leave the simulacrum chamber, but the console there would allow him to fly the ship – and the amplifier he controlled from there was the Jay’s only real weapon.
“That’s the odd part,” David replied, shaking his head. “They didn’t exclude you, and every other time I’ve been invited surface-side on these kinds of planets, they usually make that point very clear. I’m not sure they’re saying what they mean, and I want you to keep your eyes open.”
“You think the Legatans are plotting something?” Damien asked, thinking back over his limited encounters.
“No,” the Captain answered, sounding a little surprised himself. “I think Niska and Mons and their people are as level with us as they’re going to be, outside of the diversion. The locals though… I don’t trust them. I want you with us on the surface – without your medallion, Damien.”
Damien touched the gold medal he wore on a leather collar around his neck. The three stars and quill carved into it marked him as a fully trained Jump Mage. He’d earned those carvings, and technically Protectorate law made it a misdemeanor for him not to wear the medallion itself. Without it, though, there was no way to identify him, even for another Mage.
“I can do that,” he said softly. “Who are we leaving behind?” Unless they wanted to put his medallion on someone else, they could only claim four senior officers – Captain, First Officer, Chief Engineer and First Pilot.
“I’m leaving Narveer aboard, with that war-suit of his,” Rice explained. “They’ll be sending that fuel tanker over while we’re on the surface. The whole thing stinks, but I don’t see a way out without risking offending Niska – who still has our money. So we play nice, and take precautions.”
“Understood, Captain,” Damien replied, his fingers on his medallion. “We’re flying down when?”
“Late afternoon local time, about noon tomorrow Martian Standard,” Rice told him.
Before Damien could respond, a buzzer announced someone at the door to the Chamber. “I have a visitor,” he told his boss. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”
As he cut the video feed, the door to the room slid o
pen and Niska stepped in. Damien turned on the platform suspended in the center of the ovoid room to face the Augment, who calmly stood on the screens that made up the walls.
“What are you after, Major?” Damien asked.
The Legatan soldier shrugged, hitting the button to slide the door shut behind him before he said a word.
“I’m here to warn you,” he said bluntly. “I heard about Chrysanthemum’s invitation – I’m sure your Captain is wise enough to see the trick in them not explicitly excluding you, but I wanted to make sure.”
“Most UnArcana worlds make the use of magic illegal,” he explained. “On Chrysanthemum, being a Mage is illegal. I don’t think they’ll risk pissing off Legatus by causing issues with your crew, but they’ve been known to use any excuse to arrest Mages and seize ships.”
“We weren’t planning on it,” Damien told him dryly. “I’ve been arrested, Major; I don’t care to repeat the experience.”
Niska shook his head. “Be careful, Damien,” he asked. “I know you don’t like me, but you’re one of the most humble Mages I’ve ever met. If all your kind were like you, the Protectorate might be a better place.
“Chrysanthemum is run by a paranoid military junta,” he continued. “In exchange for the gunships, they’re supposed to be running elections in the next six months. Until then, though, the place is run by scum I wouldn’t trust to polish my boots, and they’re my allies.
“Whatever you do, Damien, don’t go to the surface.”
#
Damien watched the gunships leave early the next morning from the simulacrum chamber, with Kelly LaMonte, one of the other junior engineers, two of the pilots, and a bottle of champagne. With the Blue Jay in orbit, the room at the center of the ship had no gravity, making pouring difficult, but the small celebration was worth the effort.
Each gunship detached from the cargo pylons on the side of the keel in turn. A few, carefully timed, jets of the maneuvering thrusters flung the small warship through the gap in the freighter’s rotating ribs. Once clear, the characteristic white flare of an antimatter rocket flashed into existence, and the ships headed towards the Rock, the captured asteroid fifty thousand kilometers ahead of the Jay.
“That went a lot better than I was afraid it was, even with their cloak and dagger bullshit,” the older of the two pilots, a buzz-cut young man named Kelzin, announced. “Can’t imagine it was comfortable for Damien here,” he nodded to the Ship’s Mage, “but they were polite to the rest of us.”
“The ones Niska let deal with me were polite,” Damien admitted. “I think if he or Mons had any people they weren’t sure could play nice, they kept them under wraps.”
“It is going to be so nice to have half the ship back,” Kelly observed. It was hard to cuddle in zero-gravity, but she was doing her best to stay snuggled up to Damien’s side – with his enthusiastic assistance.
“We’ve still got some time on station here,” Damien replied. “The Captain’s going to try to find a cargo – we may end up carrying passengers out, too.”
The pretty young engineer made a face.
“We’ll see what comes out of the party,” Kelzin told the others. “Singh says I have to pretend Damien is my boss.”
“What?” Kelly asked, turning to look concernedly at Damien. “Chrysanthemum is an UnArcana world, you can’t be planning on going down?!”
“There’s a lot going on the Captain isn’t comfortable with,” Damien told her quietly. “He’s hedging his bets by keeping the only one of us trained in boarding and counter-boarding up here, and taking the heaviest firepower we have – me – down to the surface.”
“I’m leaving my medallion behind, and pretending to be the Jay’s First Pilot,” he explained. “I’ll be fine.”
“Singh says the whole setup stinks,” Kelzin agreed. “We’re sticking a whole bunch of those carbines Singh found us aboard the shuttle.”
“I don’t think the Captain really thinks anything is going to go down,” Damien reassured Kelly. “But if it does, between the Captain, Kelzin and me, they don’t have a big enough army to take us down.”
He felt her shiver against him regardless.
“Be careful, Damien,” she asked. “You’ll be in more danger than us – the only thing the rest of us will be up to is hooking tubes into receptacles.”
“Yep – and you have lots of practice with that recently,” Kelzin told her innocently.
Kelly promptly emptied her champagne bulb into the pilot’s face, causing him to spin back, messily wiping bubbling liquid from his face, to the general laughter of the Blue Jay’s younger officers.
#
The shuttle landed gently on a floating landing pad, mounted on pontoons a hundred meters away from the shore. As the sound of the craft’s thrusters faded away, Kelzin stuck his head back into the passenger cabin.
Damien and the other three officers all wore plain gray suits. Damien’s was worn over a shirt borrowed from Kellers, the dark-skinned engineer being the only person on the ship even close to the Mage’s short and slight frame.
“We are landed and locked in on docking pad five at Chrysanthemum City,” the pilot informed them all. As he spoke, he made his way to a locker and pulled out one of the Legatan Arms SC-5 carbines, sliding and locking both magazines in.
“Your PC’s are running coms through the shuttle relay,” Kelzin continued. “That’ll provide encrypted channels for about fifteen klicks out. I checked the map on the way down, the ‘Festival Hall’ is seven klicks from here, you should be fine.
“Check in via radio often, and don’t stay out too late,” the pilot concluded. “If you’re out past midnight, my little friend and I will come and enforce your curfew.” He patted the carbine.
“Let’s try not to start a war if we don’t have to,” David observed dryly. “That said,” he glanced around the officers, his gaze settling on Damien, “I don’t trust these people at all. Let’s make nice, see if we can get a cargo – but don’t go anywhere alone!”
The safety lecture done, Kelzin hit the door latch, opening the shuttle ramp onto the cooling pad.
“It is a balmy twenty six degrees Celsius,” he informed them, “and the wind is from the south, so you get to dodge the smell of the fisheries to the north. Enjoy yourselves. I’ll keep the lights on.”
Kellers led the way out, with Damien and Jenna following out onto the gently bobbing platform. The smell of the salt air hit Damien like a brick wall. He’d lived near the coast on Sherwood, but the smell was different here. There was a slight edge of something he couldn’t identify to the smell of sea and waves, something completely different.
The smell of a new world. For the first time in his life, Damien was walking on the surface of a strange world. At Corinthian and Legatus, he hadn’t gone to the surface, which made Chrysanthemum his first ‘alien’ world.
The water was a different shade: a deep purplish blue that lacked the slightly iridescent tinge of his homeworld’s waves. The sky was darker than Sherwood’s, with a dimmer sun shining through a thicker atmosphere. The floating landing pad wasn’t something Sherwood would have used, as his home had significant areas of granite to hold landing facilities near most of the inhabited zones.
A blonde-haired man clad in a dark blue suit was standing at the edge of the platform, where transparent barriers protected beds of bright pink flowers. He gestured for the Blue Jay’s officers to approach, and stepped out to greet them with a bright smile that made Damien think of oil.
“Welcome to Chrysanthemum City, Captain Rice,” he greeted David. “I am James Margrave, Aide to President Holsen. And these are your officers?”
“They are,” Rice confirmed, stepping past Damien to face the aide and give quick introductions. Damien found it odd to be introduced as ‘Damien Montgomery, my First Pilot,’ but nodded along regardless.
“I have a car waiting for us on the shore to take us to the Festival Hall,” Margrave told them. “President Holsen is looking for
ward to meeting you. If you’ll follow me?”
#
The trip to the Festival Hall took the Blue Jay’s officers through a neighborhood of neatly trimmed hedges, public flower gardens of dozens of varieties of chrysanthemums, and large houses set well back from the road in treed surroundings.
The impression of peace and luxury was spoiled somewhat by the view of the massive industrial complex, fisheries, factories and warehouses mixed together, that David could see to the north. He also could see the omnipresent cameras and security men that he suspected his officers missed.
He doubted even Damien missed the two patrols of uniformed, face-masked, police in black armored personnel carriers that they saw sweeping the streets. They’d been directed to the shuttle pad for the system’s dignitaries and industry leaders, so the path ran through a showcase neighborhood. Those same dignitaries required round the clock armed security on Chrysanthemum.
The Festival Hall was the clear centerpiece of the neighborhood, and of Chrysanthemum’s attempts to show off to anyone they felt they needed to. It was a massive structure, built of local stone and painted a brilliant white. Two wings swept away from a central structure that looked like an immense white clam.
The entire bottom section of the ‘clam’ apparently slid up, providing a semi-open air central chamber that open out onto a front green lined in carefully nurtured flower beds and containing a small, somewhat tasteful stone water fountain carved in the shape of a giant chrysanthemum – in case anyone had forgotten the name of the planet.
Margrave stopped the massive, open-topped black ground car he’d delivered them in, and gracefully opened the doors for them.
“Welcome to the Solstice Festival gentlemen, lady,” he told them. “The food is inside, to the left. Waiters are circulating with drinks and appetizers.” He turned to David. “Captain Rice, the staff will take excellent care of your officers. If you’ll come with me, the President wishes to speak with you.”
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 20
